Published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2021.
Rapid urbanization is reshaping economies and intensifying spatial inequalities. In Bangladesh, we experimentally introduced mobile banking to very poor rural households and family members who had migrated to the city, testing whether mobile technology can reduce inequality by modernizing traditional ways to transfer money. One year later, for active mobile banking users, urban-to-rural remit- tances increased by 26 percent of the baseline mean. Rural con- sumption increased by 7.5 percent, and extreme poverty fell. Rural households borrowed less, saved more, sent additional migrants, and consumed more in the lean season. Urban migrants experienced less poverty and saved more but bore costs, reporting worse health.
Publications
Viewing all posts with tag: Remittance
Migration and Household Finances: How a different framing can improve thinking about migration
It is time to reframe fundamentally the research agenda on migration, remittances, payments and development. Many policy‐makers in the developing world, and researchers, tend to view migrant remittances as windfall income, rather than as returns on investment, which is how families with migrants tend see remittances. Migration is thus, among other things, a strategy for financial management in poor households: location is an asset, migration an investment. We propose that this shift of perspective on remittances—from windfall to return on investment—leads to more fruitful research questions.
What's Behind Door #3? Investment in Migration for the World's Poor
What accounts for the determination of migrants to make it across borders, braving incredibly harrowing journeys by train, boat and foot? For many people around the world, migration is the very best investment they can make.
Michael Clemens: Migration and Remittances Part 3
FAI's Tim Ogden and Michael Clemens, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) and visiting scholar at NYU-Wagner, recently published a Framing Note discussing new research approaches on the role of migration and remittances in household financial management.
Michael Clemens: Migration and Remittances Part 2
FAI's Tim Ogden and Michael Clemens, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) and visiting scholar at NYU-Wagner, recently published a Framing Note discussing new research approaches on the role of migration and remittances in household financial management.
Michael Clemens: Migration and Remittances Part 1
FAI's Tim Ogden and Michael Clemens, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) and visiting scholar at NYU-Wagner, recently published a Framing Note discussing new research approaches on the role of migration and remittances in household financial management.
Migration as a Strategy for Household Finance: A Research Agenda on Remittances, Payments, and Development
It is time to fundamentally reframe the research agenda on remittances, payments, and development. We describe many of the research questions that now dominate the literature and why they lead us to uninformative answers. We propose reasons why these questions dominate, the most important of which is that researchers tend to view remittances as states do (as windfall income) rather than as families do (as returns on investment). Migration is, among other things, a strategy for fi- nancial management in poor households: location is an asset, migration an invest- ment. This shift of perspective leads to much more fruitful research questions that have been relatively neglected. We suggest 12 such questions.